Record producer and 2025 Country Music Hall of Fame Inductee Tony Brown didn’t just have his finger on the pulse of country music in the late eighties and nineties, he seemed to hold the heart of the entire genre in his creative hands.
Behind the studio glass for iconic acts like George Strait, Reba McEntire, Vince Gill, and Wynonna, he did not shy away from trying to break less mainstream acts as well.
He took a younger generation of country fan back to Texas with Lyle Lovett’s 1986 debut album. He revived an American Graffiti rockabilly vibe with Mark Collie. He similarly mined a familiar California country-rock vein while predicting the nineties country boom when working with James House on his eponymous 1989 country album.
With Marty Brown’s 1991 High and Dry, Brown brought listeners all the way back to the beginning of commercial country music. If that sounds hyperbolic, know that Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers were the historical touch-points critics and journalists most often reached for when describing this new young talent.
Now, that’s country.
The story is Tony Brown saw a 1991 profile of Marty Brown on a segment highlighting struggling country musicians on the CBS television news magazine show 48 Hours. and offered Marty Brown a recording contract with MCA.
While Music City was in love with the youthful energy and faces of the New Traditionalists, MartyBrown was celebrated as a straight-up traditionalist. Full stop.
There was nothing new about him, his sound or his image. In the case of Marty Brown, authenticity looked and sounded old-fashioned. Before even hearing the first note drop, the album promised to be a coarse and unrefined listening experience.
The backdrop for the photo on the album is a scrap of burlap. The photos is a stark one of a solitary farmhouse in a dry field.
Legend has it Brown had been kicking around Nashville trying to launch his career for several years, purportedly sleeping in alleyways, doing whatever it took to get his music heard.
In the album’s promotional shots, a gaunt Brown wears a tattered hat that legitimately looks sweat-stained. His boots are worn and look like they have actually worked in a field. Brown’s bio says he bagged groceries, worked as a mechanic, and labored as a plumber’s assistant before recording High and Dry.
Once the album was cut, he basically barnstormed the southeastern to promote it, playing Wal-Marts and local mom-and pop establishment in small rural communities leveraging one-on-one connections with his fans.
If anyone was ever too country, it was Marty Brown.
All of this back-to-the-roots genuineness and authenticity should have made for a compelling origin story, a creative new beginning for country music’s rising popularity.
Instead, Browns’ every man, workmanlike approach to plugging his album amounted to zero chart activity. He baited a tantalizing hook but country radio wouldn’t bite.
I guess they weren’t willing to get snagged on something they likely perceived as being as much backwards as it was backwoods. Brown cut too close to the hillbilly bone country music had been trying to bury for generations.
Embracing something as rough and raw as High and Dry could leave them just that. Better let radio first see what they could do with Aaron Tippin’s You’ve Got to Stand for Something on RCA.
Fitting, that Brown was writing songs about pouring his heart out to a woman who didn’t want to drink.
Brown wrote nine of the ten songs on his debut album by himself, the tenth was a co-write. He wrote songs about honky tonky specials and sugar daddies, honky tonks and record machines, muddy rivers and home.
A song as fun and silly as “Ole King Kong” threatened to take country music out behind the barn again.
As stark as the title-track and “Nobody Knows” are, “Every Now and Then” betrays how huge an influence the Everly Brothers were on Brown.
Brown sounds unexpectedly vulnerable and tender on “Wildest Dreams.”
The drama and dynamics of “I’ll Climb Any Mountain” suggests at least some pop influences passed through Maceo, Kentucky while drifting down the Ohio River.
Despite existing in that weird realm of “critic’s darling,” Brown managed to sell over 100,000 copies of High and Dry with zero radio support.
Brown would go on to record two more albums with MCA but never get any Top 40 traction. He released an album on High Tone Records in 1996.
In 2013, he auditioned for America’s Got Talent, performing a rendition of Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love.”
in 2019, he recorded American Highway on Plowboy Records.
To close the Tony and Marty Brown circle, perhaps the best indication of Marty‘s ongoing iconic appeal to traditionalists is the inclusion of his composition “To the Moon” on George Strait’ s Tony Brown- produced 2024 album Cowboys and Dreamers.
…”if anyone was ever too country, it was Marty Brown”, could be the understatement of the last 250 years or so. he makes zach top look as progressive as pink floyd – in a country sort of way. burner, this pick.
I was always partial to Brown as a fellow Kentuckian: As much as I loathe “authenticity” as a signifier, he certainly reminded me of people from here I know well. And I think you’re dead-on that, in the early 90s, his particular brand of hillbilly represented everything Music Row was trying to run away from.
What’s interesting to me is that this record didn’t sell terribly for something without a radio hit in an era when radio (and, if your cable company had CMT or TNN, video) were really the primary points of access. Compare Brown’s image and sound to fellow Kentuckian Tyler Childers; they’re cut from that same burlap sackcloth. And I just saw Childers– along with KY proud natives SG Goodman and Wynonna– perform two weeks ago for about 40,000 people here in town. Had Brown released this exact album in, say, 2021? He’s a massive star, albeit one who still shines outside of Music Row.
…off topic jonathan: how was ms. goodman live in concert?
I had a single of “Here’s to the Honkytonks” I got out of a cutout bin once when I was a kid. Never heard any other mention of him for years, until I found out about all his material through Wikipedia. Great stuff all around.